The Solution
To keep up with the growing demand for its products from three distinct businesses and channels, Seacore had to automate core business functions including inventory management, accounting, route management, order entry, logistics, and retail point-of-sale. Seacore staff were overwhelmed by the time-consuming manual processes which inhibited the company’s enormous growth prospects. Moreover, Seacore executives grew concerned about the potential negative impact that the tedious and labor-intensive manual processes could have on the company’s customer service, order delivery times and inventory control.

Seacore Seafood Director of Operations, Sal Battaglia, sought an ERP software solution that would improve core business functions such as accounting, while offering specific food distribution, logistics, and retail point-of-sale capabilities. Battaglia evaluated many different ERP software packages but found VAI’s S2K software the most robust and flexible solution to meet the specialized requirements of a fast-growing seafood wholesale and retail distributor.

With the installation of VAI’s S2K for Food software with S2K e-Commerce, Seacore automated and integrated key business processes across the organization. The company has dramatically improved its customer delivery times, order accuracy, and overall customer service.

The Result
After implementing VAI S2K Route Manager and S2K for Food, Seacore has realized tremendous business benefits that have allowed them to drive an impressive growth trajectory.

Since the launch, Seacore Seafood is using VAI ERP software to:

• Improve Accounts Receivables Management — 85% of Seacore’s account receivables are now current – which is almost unheard of in the food distribution industry.
• Attain Faster Customer Delivery Rates and Reduced Order Picking Time — Truck routing processes have improved by 50%, ensuring extremely high levels of prompt customer delivery. With S2K Route Manager, Seacore can view its orders and number of orders per route, enabling the company to set up its deliveries most efficiently. Utilizing bulk and wave picking, Seacore reduced its order picking time by 40%, further increasing its already impressive on-time delivery rates.
• Streamline Fish Cutting Process — Seacore removed lengthy steps from its fish-cutting process through the S2K automation, leading to an 80% efficiency rate. This allowed Seacore to save time and service more customers, thereby growing its business exponentially.
• Keep Up-to-the-Minute Consolidated Financials — The company can now view its consolidated financials at the push of a button and view instantly how retail sales are faring hour-to-hour or minute-by-minute. This is especially important during busy seasonal periods and major holidays such as Christmas, when the retail division realizes a 1000% sales increase.
• Achieve Greater Inventory Accuracy — With three distinct divisions sharing a master inventory, Seacore wanted to do automatic transfers within each company, in real-time. VAI tailored the installation in such a way that if one Seacore division used an item that was purchased by another company, an automatic transfer would be made and the inventory along with the ledger accounts would be auto adjusted to keep everything in balance. The S2K installation also introduced bin locations to the Seacore warehouse, allowing the Seacore staff to know the exact location of an item especially when there are multiple pallets in different locations.
• Realize Faster Order Entry — Seacore was able to hasten order entry as well as meet specific customer requirements. For example, a customer may want only certain items sold to their locations and their own item numbers would have to appear on invoices. With VAI S2K, Seacore can create order guides from history or from a custom list and restrict a customer to only buy those items on their order guide.
• Accomplish Automatic Real-time Traceability — Seacore can now do full traceability on where the seafood comes from and how it was caught – information which has become increasingly important to retailers such as Whole Foods, as well as its consumers. VAI S2K enables Seacore to provide this information to its customers in real-time.
• Integrate Point-of-Sale — VAI installed its Point-of-Sale application for Seacore’s retail operation. By accessing the same inventory files as its wholesale division, Seacore can instantly see inventory commitments from its retail store or warehouse operation.
• Integrate e-Commerce — Seacore implemented S2K e-Commerce to allow customers to place orders through the Seacore website. In addition, customers can check their order status and access their account status and current receivables.

• Rapid implementation
• More accurate and up-to-the-minute inventory management
• Real-time consolidated financials
• Timely account receivables management
• Faster customer delivery rates and reduced order picking time
• Faster, more accurate order entry
• Greater inventory accuracy
• Faster route management processing
• Full traceability of products
• Immediate financial reports
• 85% Current accounts receivables
• Reduced order picking time by 40%
• Greater inventory accuracy
• Integrated retail and wholesale businesses into one system
• Increased manufacturing by 80%
• Improved customer service and web presence